Burst to Windows Azure with Microsoft HPC Pack

This section contains information about extending your Windows HPC cluster to include Windows Azure worker role instances as compute resources. Using these Windows Azure nodes, you can increase (“burst”) the capacity of your on-premises cluster either on-demand or according to a schedule you configure.

You add the Windows Azure nodes to the cluster and provision them in Windows Azure by using the tools provided in HPC Pack. HPC Pack manages and monitors the communication with a Windows Azure cloud service and storage account in your Windows Azure subscription, and gives you access to additional Windows Azure features for your deployments. Then, you can use the Windows Azure nodes to run many of the applications and jobs that can run in an on-premises cluster.

Note

Support for deploying Windows Azure nodes was introduced in HPC Pack 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1).